>Art McGee wrote:
>
>>I'm trying to approach organizing from the bottom, not from the top.
>
>Can you really do that, and if so, is it the right thing to do? Is it
>desirable to organize people without challenging some of their basic
>beliefs? Isn't the common sense of ordinary people in part a way to cope
>with their oppression and/or marginalization, a way that may be adaptive in
>the short term but a way of thinking that preserves
>oppression/marginalization over the long term? Doesn't the organizer
>presume to know something the people to be organized don't? I know there's
>the danger of appearing arrogant and patronizing by advertising that
>knowledge, and the risk of alienating people by attacking their common
>sense understanding, but shouldn't we be honest about this?
>
>As usual, those are all real, and not rhetorical, questions.
I'd like to quote Alinsky here:
'The area of experience and communication is fundamental to the organiser. An organiser can only communicate within the areas of experience of his audience; otherwise there is no communication. ... [The successful organiser] refrains from rhetoric foreign to the local culture: he knows that worn-out [ideological] words [serve] only to identify the speaker as "one of those nuts" and to turn off any further communication.'
He goes on to say that only certain beliefs should be challenged, notably the beliefs of powerlessness and fatalistic acceptance of outside control. But the challenge must come obliquely, and only within a context people can understand based on their own experience.
The basic message is avoid ideology; stay inside your allies' experience; go outside the opposition's. And yes, work from the ground up.
Margaret